I've been back home two days & return to work today. I got busy during the trip & sort of lost my momentum to keep writing. But made myself finish this up this morning.
When I first planned this trip in January I had hoped to see at least one more play at the Shaw Festival. But the airline moved my early morning flight to later in the day, making it impossible to get to Niagra-on-the-Lake earlier than Sunday. This had me in Toronto for one night allowing me to see the big concert. As things worked out I'm glad I went to the Shaw Festival first, & Stratford second, because if I had done the trip the other way round I would have been disappointed. That's a long winded way of saying that the quality of the productions I saw at the Stratford Festival were much higher.
If the Stratford production of Guys & Dolls was on Broadway & someone said it cost $20 million I would believe it - but I bet they did it for a fraction of that. The cast, costumes, staging, choreography - everything was extraordinary. In her program notes director Donna Feore makes much about how important it was to her to use the 1992 Broadway orchestrations by Michael Starobin. The music was indeed fantastic from the band of what I count from the program as 18 musicians. The overture started and cast members were already on stage with everything in black & white like an old movie, then a black out & suddenly a newspaper reporter's camera flashes & with quick changes to costumes everything is in technicolor. We're not looking at history, we're right there alive in 1948 (or whatever year this is) witnessing it all happening now for the first time ever! Everything felt fresh, not actually a show I've seen many times before.
I saw that my second day in Stratford, and the two shows I had seen before that were also fantastic, but Guys & Dolls was the top.
This show snd The Tempest, which I had seen the night before, were both presented in the Festival Theatre built in 1957. It features a thrust stage similar to the layout of Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont, but is much larger with about 1800 seats.
For both shows I had really excellent center orchestra seats and my ticket stubs tell me that I only paid $45CAN for each. Ridiculously cheap!
The Tempest is directed by Festival Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino & he knows what audiences want from Shakespeare, giving a lavish traditional production. When you read about the crazy productions from the 1800's with live animals etc on stage - this might be as close to that as we will get in our day. The actor playing Caliban was in a full costume with fur, claws, talons & a tail that whipped about - he reminded me of the Warner Brother's cartoonTasmanian Devil. In a marvel of stagecraft, large set pieces like a pile of rocks encrusted with mussels, or a huge piece of coral suddenly would come alive, unfold & move about the stage, settling down again elsewhere to set a new scene - it was all stage hands in elaborate costumes. What a sensation!
But still this didn't reach the peak of maximal theatre. For that we take you to the Avon Theatre built in 1901 & this year's production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Huge overstuffed sets with a garden overflowing the front of stage, & costumes that took the breath away. Currently in the role of Algernon is young actor Carter Gulseth. He reminds me a great deal of the late John Ritter, but with a mouth containing what seems like double the number of teeth owned by the average human. He's constantly giving these big wide hilarious grins. A star in the making, while the star everyone has come to see is Fiona Reid as Lady Bracknell. She has two enormous cotton candy colored costumes that left audience members gasping. This is Theatre of the Most. Anything more would require connecting the audience up to IV bags and putting sugar right into our bloodstream.
So if that isn't your thing then you probably would enjoy the more somber & stately production of Othello at the newest theatre built for the Festival, the Tom Patterson which opened in 2022. It is a long rectangular thrust stage with audiences seated on three sides. It was finely acted with a simple set & costumes placing it vaguely in the middle ages. Only because I had been over-stimulated by the previous three shows did it feel like a comedown - well that and the gruesome deaths at the end. I knew what I was in for going in, but these days I have to cover my eyes during scenes of violence. There's enough real violence going on in the world I can't be witness to more.
My quick visit to the Stratford Festival was well worth the time & planning. It does take time to get there & back because the traffic getting to & from Toronto is atrocious. I drove back Thursday midday and got stuck in grueling 3 hour gridlock on the 401 much worse than anything we have even at rush hour in Vancouver.
One thing more I liked about visiting Stratford was that while it did get hot during the day, it didn't have the high humidity of Toronto or Niagra & cooled in the evening. In Vancouver we don't get high humidity, so I really struggled with the heat in Toronto even though they said it was a fairly mild week.
I saw two plays once back in Toronto. Thursday night I saw the Toronto sitdown of & Juliet which just ended its run early this past weekend. I hadn't planned to see it, but in June that briefly ran a discount offer for $50 seats & so I got an excellent orchestra seat at a bargain price. I saw the OBC of this show in NYC in 2023. It's interesting how a difference in line readings can make or break a show. The actress playing Anne Hathaway in Toronto relied so much on shtick compared to what I remember from how Betsy Wolfe handled the role. But here I think the lead Vanessa Sears had stronger vocals than I remember from Lorna Courtney in NYC. The week I saw this in New York I also saw Camelot, Kimberly Akimbo, Parade, & Sweeney Todd - so this show felt pretty weak in comparison. Seeing it again I was able to appreciate more of its charms. It is still a fairly crass commercial enterprise, like a McDonald's Big Mac of a show. It's fun while it lasts, even if it tastes like plastic.
Finally I went to this year's summer outdoor Shakespeare production of Twelfth Night from Canada Stage at High Park. This was actually a bit far from where I was staying Downtown Toronto than I expected, taking about an hour on the subway & walking to get there. They have an small outdoor amphitheater with seating on terraces of concrete & grass. Seating is generally admission for a ticket price of $35 plus fees, and you have to bring your own blanket to sit on. They don't allow any folding chairs that might cause you to block the view of others. They do have some very low folding chairs for a $5 rental fee, but from what I saw just sitting on a beach towel was as comfortable. You do need to arrive very early to get a good place, and then everyone brought picnic dinners for the wait. No alcohol is allowed in High Park. By showtime they fill the place to almost beyond capacity with attendants constantly asking people to move over & make space to crowd in more audience members. Fortunately my neighbours on both sides were very pleasant folks & we had some fun conversations. People are very friendly in Toronto. It's not that people in Vancouver are unfriendly, it's just that we hate you and would rather you were dead than have to speak to you. 🙂🙃 Anyways, they presented the play in a lively, shortened 90 minute version with no intermission. I really didn't notice what might have been cut. Set & costumes had us vaguely in the middle ages, & all performances were very fine. But in the role of fool Feste, Steven Sutcliffe stole the show for me.
That wrapped my time in Toronto. During the day I did do sight seeing like going up the CN Tower & visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario, so I didn’t have the energy for any late night carousing - even though there were gay bars near me & I passed plenty of cute groups of boys obviously bar hopping on my way back to my stay both nights after the shows.
Life in Toronto definitely seems tempting - both gas & groceries also seem much cheaper than Vancouver, but I'm settled & too acclimated to our far more temperate weather.
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